Chris Hann (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle):

“The nation”, as much as “the people” are contested concepts. Over the past years, Eastern Europe has been seeing the emergence of a broad range of actors seeking to advance the trajectories of conservative, nationalist or populist projects. Though sharing important features - often stirred together under the notion of ‚nationalist backlash‘ - both the ideological diversity and strategic variance of these projects, at closer inspection, seem impressive, adding up to heterogeneous phenomena with complex historical and cultural references. Moreover, these new collectivist movements are embedded in specific socio-economic and political contexts.

The lecture series seeks to approach these new and old nationalisms in Eastern Europe, their (re-)emergences as well as social and political consequences from a broad range of theoretical angles. How are Eastern Europe’s new collectivisms being constructed? On what historical and cultural resources and references do these projects draw? Which actors are involved? Based on which economic, cultural and political cleavages do nationalist entrepreneurs mobilize their supporters? Finally: Who has been excluded from these collectivist projects and how can scholars ‘make these subalterns speak’, both conceptually and empirically?